The Owly Illustrations

Recently, my wife worked on a 12-pager concept about child's care. To give it a neat touch, she asked me to do some illustrations. The theme, or how she called her hypothetical group of Under-Three-Year-Olds, was 'The Owl-Nest'. The painting below is the finished front cover. It was done with watercolor pencils and wet brushes.

Here are the very first sketches from imagination with the help of some internet pictures of owls and their babies, to close in on their basic structure. See... even at this early stage of the process, some of them made it into the final picture.

This is the tight comprehensive pencil drawing I used for tracing the composition right onto the watercolor paper (you might still see the marks). A tight comprehensive is a detailed sketch which will be used as the ultimate reference for the final painting. Of course, since I handle my wife's request just like a job, she had to approve before diving into the full color finish.

I knew, there would not be enough time to do more colored owls. So... as it goes, the last evening before putting the whole concept together, ready to be submitted, I quickly doodled a couple of stand-alones with a brush pen to fill in some blanks.